Podcast: Why Bother Writing in Dark Times?
With anne hawley & Rachelle Ramirez
Rachelle and Anne discuss the importance of creativity and writing during challenging times. They explore how writing can help individuals personally by enhancing self-esteem, resilience, and mental health, and collectively by fostering empathy and connection. Writing different types of narratives—be it fun stories or political essays—remains significant, even when the world feels tumultuous. Every form of storytelling, whether a memo, a romantic novel, or an essay, can be a powerful tool for personal expression and societal impact.
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transcript
Anne Hawley: Times are dark. Who do you think you are, writing stories when the world is burning? Hello and welcome to The Write Anyway podcast from pages and platforms and the happily Ever Author Club. In today's episode, Rachelle and I talk about why your creativity and your craft might be more important now than ever before.
Hi, Rachelle.
Rachelle Ramirez: Hey, how are you?
Anne Hawley: There have been better times in the world than right now. How about you?
Rachelle Ramirez: True. Yeah. My writing clients are saying a lot of things about writing now in the times of the world falling apart. I was hoping we could talk about that today.
Anne Hawley: I think it'd be a great subject 'cause I struggle with it myself. And I imagine you do too. What's the point of writing, expressing creativity, being creative in these dark times? And I will just add that I got a WhatsApp message from a friend of mine who lives in Germany and reports for the Guardian.
And she had written a story about the protests in London over the last couple of days. And even, across the ocean, people are concerned about what's happening with this country, and it does feel pointless sometimes to sit down every day to my work when I should be quote unquote, doing something more important.
What are you hearing?
Rachelle Ramirez: I would say especially when you're internalizing the idea that art is undervalued. You're hearing the voices of those around you saying, we need to do more, this needs to change. And you think, oh, then what am I doing here in this self-indulgent luxury of, this frivolous distraction. Am I being lazy? I should be a politician or a policymaker. An activist. Or a firefighter, that's the way that I'm going to be contributing to society. And that's not actually true for everyone. Obviously we need those people, but there are a lot of reasons I think to write.
You wanna talk a little bit about that?
Anne Hawley: Yeah. What do you think is the most important reason at any time for anyone to be a writer?
Rachelle Ramirez: I think the most important thing is that it changes you, the writer, that in many ways, if you're driven to write that it's your calling or it's the muse, however you look at it, I'm gonna assume your strengths are probably in writing, or at least some strengths are in writing and.
There's a great reason to use that as, use your gifts because that's gonna help you develop self-esteem, resilience. It's gonna help you find your place in the world. There are studies that show that creative works, whether it be painting, writing, sculpture, that engaging in those sort of acts are as important on physical and mental health as exercise.
There are multiple studies that show that enriching, some people might call it enriching their spirit, enriching their self, they might call it self care, but those are very important aspects of our own personal health.
And if you think about it, if we can't. If we don't have our own health and our own solidity, feet on the ground, how are we going to help others? How can we view what's happening around us or to us with clear glasses instead of the shit colored ones. If we ourselves aren't grounded in some way, right?
If we're not taking care of ourselves. So that's, I think the most important thing. The other pieces of that is that it can help you connect to others. That could be really important and give you a sense of meaning. When you're writing something and you get feedback from others who say, that meant something to me, or, Hey, let's talk about your story, or you're connecting with other writers about your story, those things are really important. It's building community too.
Anne Hawley: What you're saying seems to suggest, and I think I agree that even if all I'm writing is a fun, romantic suspense story that's sexy and juicy, that still I don't have to turn my attention to writing, say, political essays or something, to help sort out the world; that it is just as important in the question of my mental health, my firm standing in the world, my wellbeing, for me to write the story that I wanna write, or the memoir, or the essay, or the poetry that I wanna write, even if it's not out to persuade people politically or change people's minds about large world issues.
Rachelle Ramirez: Yes, and ultimately I also think it will because reading helps the reader in so many ways. A lot of times it's books and stories we read or stories we watch that actually give us more empathy for people or for the other perspective. It's a way that we share ideas with one another rather than just complaining.
Stories are what politicians and policy makers use to drive those things forward. Stories are important. They evoke emotions in us. Anger. They can inspire us. Even if your story is say I have a romantic fantasy set on the planet mercury, right? And then and it.
Anne Hawley: Venus is more romantic.
Rachelle Ramirez: It may be that you are entertaining someone and in some ways you're driving cultural attitudes, perhaps about stories of others. Maybe there are things that are happening in your world, in your fantastical story that are commentaries in some way on either what's going on in the reader's life or what's going on elsewhere, or it's evoking empathy for other types of creatures, you don't know what the impact is of your story, right?
What if you're just writing to pay the bills or for an ego, let's appeal to your ego for a second. What if it's just I'm creating a legacy? There's nothing wrong with that. these narratives might be the pieces that we have the gifts to hand down, rather than, what's the alternative? Doomscrolling? Complaining? Like, what are we really going to do? If you are really somebody who is, look, I'm gonna get in there and I'm gonna be an activist or a firefighter, or I'm gonna do these things that I think are really important to change the world, get out there and do that. But if you're not that person, if that's not where your gifts lie, that's not what you want to do or are driven to do, there's no reason why writing isn't just as important.
Anne Hawley: I also think that recording your own
morning pages type of thing. Those thoughts that you may have, processing the day , or if you do doom scroll, which I admit I do sometimes too, to process some of that is also a way of capturing this world in this moment. Maybe nobody will ever read it. Chances are if it's your morning pages, nobody ever will.
But I have found to some extent that processing my feelings in writing, which is how I process everything, has helped me structure, maybe an essay or a newsletter that expresses something that, even if it's not a fun story, it helps somebody think differently. But if I am also maybe working on just a fun story, a romantic story, or a, an exciting action story, that if that gets out into the world, if I'm able to publish it and put it in front of people and somebody gets two hours of complete relief from the awfulness of the world from that, what a gift that is.
Rachelle Ramirez: And it's a gift not just to other individuals, but to the community, the society at large, because think about what they're doing when they sit down and read: you're actually capturing their attention in a specific way that say not being spent on, being driven by, capital co, giant corporations and that sort of thing, your, you are connecting them back to humanity.
Your writing keeps people connected from, from not us being swallowed by AI in so many ways. It grounds us in humanity. And while AI writing still has huge faults, it will be the types of flaws that we put in our human writing that make our writing, I think, so much more resonant with readers than say something AI is going to generate.
I think it's really important that we think about writing as our space, our place, and our way to connect to others. And people need our stories. People need relief. They need calm, they need a break. They need, way different ways to see many of the same problems.
When I was growing up I had very little parental interaction, and my way of learning about what to do and what to do was to read stories because, oh, what did the parents and there say, or how do these people solve these stories? Or to watch a lot of Brady Bunch. Oh how do they solve problems in healthy, functional families?
Stories can be really important in ways you don't expect as a writer. Did the writers of Brady Bunch think that they were helping me solve general problems about, say, bullying or theft in school or something? Did they probably not, but it helped.
Anne Hawley: But it had that effect even though the writers didn't necessarily expect it to. Then the bottom line here is pretty clear. It's okay to give yourself permission to keep writing and writing towards what you love and what you wanna express even, and maybe especially, when the world looks like it's burning down.
Rachelle Ramirez: I think especially, and especially if you're somebody who feels like you're in the margins of society, speaking up when the larger powers seem to be even more oppressive, or they're trying to gain a stronger foothold, or maintain the foothold that they once had. It's the narratives that we use even in fiction that give readers the understanding of different perspectives and those narratives are really an act of rebellion in a lot of ways. You're being an activist in many ways for your point of view. Sometimes it might be because you have diverse characters, and sometimes it might not be, it might be just, you have a woman who say is pregnant and she also thinks and solves a problem in her story.
Who knows what it is, right? You may have, an indigenous woman who, solves a problem rather than just being a nameless victim or something. Little pieces in there. Of these are our stories, add up to change the cultural narrative, and I think it's really important.
Anne Hawley: I have read, and I think there's probably some pretty good documentary evidence for this, that Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel in 1850, whatever it was, Uncle Tom's Cabin-- we can't read it today. It is unreadable today-- but because it was such a best seller in its day, it changed the course of the country towards abolition. It changed the country in relation to the Civil War. And novels, if that's what you are writing, novels are extremely powerful devices for changing minds. Even if you don't reach the mass audience of the entire United States of America, you might reach a few people whose views, whose prejudices, whose preconceived notions may shift because they read a really good story about characters that otherwise they wouldn't have ever met or known.
Rachelle Ramirez: Yeah. Yeah, that's great. How else do we learn, there, there are other ways, obviously, to learn about people unlike ourselves, but books are a great way to really get in there and have the time and the ability to put it down, take a break, in the doses that you're able to digest it. Go back over things if you need to research something you didn't understand in the moment, rather than a conversation that you just miss and get defensive about, perhaps. Books are powerful tools. Fiction memoir, what, whatever they are, narrative nonfiction in general.
Anne Hawley: Short stories. Yeah. I feel better. think I'm, I think I'm gonna go do some more writing here. How about you?
Rachelle Ramirez: Yeah. . I wanna say one note to memoir writers too, that this idea of, you're a narcissist if you write, when all these other things are happening, you're just writing about yourself. That's just. A story you're being told and you're telling yourself that is not true.
That many people are looking for answers in the stories of others, and you might just be the one who provides that for, even if it's one person, like you said, makes a huge difference.
Anne Hawley: Amen.
Rachelle Ramirez: Yeah,
Anne Hawley: Well, thanks Rachelle. Let's, um, let's tell the world.
Rachelle Ramirez: let's do it.
Anne Hawley: Bye.
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And that's it for this episode of the Write Anyway Podcast. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.